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xtruss · 4 years ago

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Asian Century Began in May 2020

Region has emerged as an economic zone as closely integrated as the European Union

By David Goldman | June 22, 2020 | Anti-Empire.Com | Asia Times | Russia Insider

Economic historians may date the start of the Asian century to May 2020, when most Asian economies bounced back to full employment while the West languished in coronavirus lockdown.

Asia has emerged as an economic zone as closely integrated as the European Union, increasingly insulated from economic shocks from the United States or Europe.

Google’s daily data on workplace mobility uses smartphone location to determine the number of people going to work – by far the most accurate and up-to-date available reading on economic activity. As of May 13, Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam were back to normal levels. Japan and Germany had climbed back to 20% below normal. The US, France and the UK remain paralyzed. Google can’t take readings in China, but the available evidence indicates that China is on the same track as Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam.

Asian economic recovery is consistent with success in controlling the Covid-19 pandemic. China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have Covid-19 death rates a tenth of Germany’s and a hundredth of the rate in the US, UK, France or Spain. [My guess is due to wider T-cell cross-immunity from prior coronaviruses.] As I reported May 21, the US is struggling to re-open its economy despite a much higher rate of new infections than the Asian countries or Germany. That entails substantial risk. Two Ford Motor plants in the US that had re-opened May 17 shut yesterday after employees tested positive for Covid-19, for example.

Asia’s short-term surge followed its success in disease prevention. [Its greater exposure to recent coronaviruses before Covid-19.] But the long-term driver of Asian growth is China’s emergence as a tech superpower. This week’s session of the People’s Congress in Beijing is expected to pass a $1.4 trillion of new government investments in 5G broadband, factory automation, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and related fields.

Asia now acts as a cohesive economic bloc. Sixty percent of Asian countries’ trade is within Asia, the same proportion as the European Union. The Google mobility numbers confirm what we learned earlier this month from China’s April trade data. Intra-Asian trade surged year-over-year, while trade with the United States stagnated.

The surge in Chinese trade with Southeast Asia, South Korea and Taiwan shows the extent of Asian economic integration. China’s exports to Asia have grown much faster than its trade with the US, which stagnated after 2014.

China’s stock market meanwhile is this year’s top performer, down only 2% year-to-date on the MSCI Index in US dollar terms while all other major exchanges are deep in negative numbers. The strength of China’s stock market is noteworthy given the escalation of economic warfare with the US, including a US ban on third-party exports of computer chips made with US intellectual property to blacklisted Chinese companies, and the threat to de-list Chinese companies on US stock exchange.

Healthcare technology companies, though, led the Chinese stock market, with Alibaba Health Information more than doubling year to date. China’s ambition to lead the world in artificial intelligence and big data analysis in the health sector got a boost from the Covid-19 pandemic, to the consternation of US officials.

Last week the US Commerce Department imposed controls on sales of semiconductors to Chinese firms on Washington’s “entity list,” if they are produced anywhere in the world with US technology. China’s telecommunications giant Huawei, the world leader in 5G broadband, designs its own chips and contracts their fabrication to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, the world’s top chip foundry. TSMC uses American chip-making equipment and will fall under the ban. Industry analysts are waiting to see how strictly the US will enforce these rules, which have a 120-day grace period.

As I wrote on May 18, this represents a bet-the-farm gamble on the part of the Trump Administration, which has failed to dissuade most of its allies from doing business with Huawei, which Washington labels a threat to US national security. A handful of US companies and Holland’s ASML now dominate the market for semiconductor fabrication equipment that can produce state-of-the-art chips. If the US prevents foundries around the world from selling to Huawei, the Chinese firm will have no source of high-end semiconductors. Huawei reportedly has a large inventory of chips; China’s semiconductor imports doubled between late 2017 and late 2018, suggesting that China has stockpiled chips as a precaution. The US ban if fully implemented would damage the Chinese firm.

But that is the last card that Washington has to play. Semiconductor manufacturing equipment is America’s last control point among critical technologies. In US corporate boardrooms and engineers’ Internet chat rooms, the question is not whether, but when China will reverse engineer American or Dutch machines and produce its own.

China may not be able to buy high-end computer chips, but it can hire all the chip engineers it wants anywhere in the world. Taiwan now dominates chip fabrication, and a tenth of Taiwan’s chip engineers are now working at double pay on the Chinese mainland, according to media reports.

In the past, China has established its high-tech autonomy much faster than most observers expected. Its number two telecommunications equipment firm ZTE nearly shut down in April 2018 after Washington embargoed sales of the Qualcomm chips that power its smartphones. By December 2018, Huawei was producing its own Kirin chipset, with more power than the Qualcomm product. China still uses American software to design chips, and depends on Taiwanese foundries using US equipment. If China reaches self-sufficiency in chip production quickly, the last stronghold of US tech dominance will fall.

Source: Asia Times

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dippedanddripped · 5 years ago

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Consulting firm BCG has revised its initial estimates and expects a drop in luxury sales between $85 and $120 billion in 2020, up from its first $40 billion forecast.

China is showing positive signs of recovery, but domestic demand might not be matched by supply as luxury production remains on lockdown in Europe.

Tourism spending will continue to be impacted at least until the end of the year, with substantial consequences for luxury brands.

A month after it published its initial forecast on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on luxury sales, consulting firm Boston Consulting Group is revising its estimates for a more negative outlook. Luxury brands should brace for a decline in sales between $85 and $120 billion in 2020, or around 29.2 per cent of the $350 billion luxury market. The fashion and luxury category as a whole will lose between $450 and $600 billion in sales.

The steep decline, driven by the expansion of the pandemic to an increasing number of regions over the last month, will bring the luxury market to the same levels of 2011, says Javier Seara, BCG’s global sector leader for fashion and luxury. It is also a bigger drop than the one suffered by the industry during the 2008 recession, although Seara thinks comparisons make little sense.

The financial crisis of 12 years ago spared a large part of the wealthier class, wreaking havoc on the middle and lower classes; as a health emergency, the Covid-19 outbreak is affecting all consumers in the same way, albeit with different degrees of intensity in terms of economic consequences. “The previous recession was not a consumer crisis, but a financial crisis,” says Seara, adding that the 2008 recession started first and foremost from banks and then trickled down to jobs and consumer confidence. “What we are living through right now is more deeply and drastically on a human dimension, it has to do with existential anxiety more than financial anxiety.”

According to the report, industry sales have declined up to 85 per cent in China in the space of two months, during the country’s lockdown period. In countries like Italy, France and Spain, the decline has reached 95 per cent. This drastic drop represents an existential danger for fashion companies, which are traditionally poor in cash, are often dependent on private equity and can have high debt levels. “Many companies in the industry will default in the next 12 weeks,” says Seara. He advises companies to prioritise employees and cash flow now, before starting to plan for a post-outbreak recovery, which, in any case, is a long way away.

Even in the best-case scenario, BCG estimates sales will still be down at least 10 per cent in December 2020, in comparison to 2019. “Seeing a recovery in the third quarter of the year and reaching 80-90 per cent of [last year's] sales in the fourth quarter would be quite an optimistic situation,” says Tianbing Zhang, Deloitte APAC consumer product and retail sectors leader.

An uncertain road to recovery

After suffering as the first epicentre of the pandemic, mainland China is also emerging as the first country to cautiously approach recovery, which is not only a consequence of being ahead on the emergency timeline compared to other regions. The country had a reasonably solid pre-outbreak economy, high consumer confidence (Chinese consumers represent over a third of global luxury spending) and relies less on tourism spending than regions like Europe and the US. BCG sees China recovering faster and more positively than all other regions, reaching a 5 to 10 per cent decline in sales in December compared to the 15 to 20 per cent decline expected in southern Europe.

“Chinese customers are already going back to shopping; we see a fast recovery of the willingness to buy and of the Chinese consumer confidence,” says Federica Levato, partner at Bain & Company. Bain has previously forecasted that Chinese consumers will make 46 per cent of luxury consumption by 2025, up to 33 per cent in 2019. Despite the impact of the coronavirus emergency, Levato sees this trend happening faster than anticipated. Zhang says at the beginning of this week industry associations saw a 30 per cent increase in footfall in shopping malls in major cities over two weeks ago.

The persistence of travel bans, at least until the emergency is curbed and under control across the world, is likely to accelerate the repatriation of Chinese luxury spending. Again, Levato thinks this is likely to happen faster than what Bain anticipated in 2019, when they predicted 50 per cent of Chinese luxury consumption becoming domestic by 2025. While this represents an opportunity for luxury brands, it also has a sizable downside. “Even if the demand comes back, there is a question mark in terms of whether the brands can provide enough new products in the next few months to meet the demand,” says Veronica Wang, a partner at OC&C Strategy Consultants. Most luxury factories and manufacturers are located in Europe and are currently closed, with no certainty about when they will be reopened and in what capacity.

Goodbye to tourism spending

For Seara one of the only key learnings from the recession of 2008 is that, once the emergency has passed, brands will face a completely new scenario. “There is not much value in planning for business as usual,” he says. One of the most significant changes is likely to be in tourism spending and travel shopping, as travelling between countries will continue to be curtailed and possibly more onerous than before. BCG estimates there will be a delay of up to three months between the restart of local economies, including the reopening of business activities, and the beginning of spending on travel.

“I don't see a recovery in tourism sales anytime soon, probably not until the fourth quarter of this year, if we assume that by then the whole world has put [the emergency] under control,” says Deloitte’s Zhang.

Bain sees some silver linings in intra-Asia travels, which could show signs of recovery in Q4 2020 given that the region is further ahead on the emergency timeline than the West. If so, luxury spending may only contract by between 10 and 15 per cent, rather than a 30 to 35 per cent worst-case scenario Bain outlined in a report on Friday.

The situation, however, remains critical. Tokyo has seen a recent spike in coronavirus cases, prompting the governor to say the capital could go into lockdown. Hong Kong, whose luxury market is particularly dependent on mainland Chinese consumers, has seen retail sales plummeting 21 per cent in January. The Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) has said “zero visitors” will enter the city in the upcoming months, while inbound and outbound flight passengers dropped 68 per cent in February.

Strategies for the new normal

To face the drop in offline spending, many brands have invested in online strategies. According to Bain’s Levato, digital shopping is likely to accelerate both because consumers have more time on their hands, but also because interacting with e-commerce sites has become a necessity. “It has somehow unlocked the digital shopping [experience] for many of the markets that were somehow lagging behind, not only on the core luxury and fashion customer but also on the broader population,” she says, noting that people of all ages have now flocked to online grocery shopping.

For BCG’s Seara, aside from shifting investment, marketing spending and inventory from Europe to China and South Korea, brands need to carefully optimise their next three seasons, choosing what can be taken off the Spring/Summer 2020 market and sold next season, what orders should be cancelled and what stock should be liquidated. “Not optimising for summer sales has consequences for the next few seasons, so we are very adamant with brands in saying it is the moment to really think about what is the plan for the next few seasons as a whole, because it's very interconnected.”

Decoupling the supply chain from the traditional seasonal model could be the answer. Bain suggests brands invests less on unnecessary expenditures like fashion shows during the crisis period and revise when products should be dropped, the number of SKUs and the way they are presented to customers.

#luxury fashion #fashion blog #luxury retailers

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worldnewsinfo · 5 years ago

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Coronavirus: Italy to close all schools as deaths rise

Italy has confirmed that it will shut all schools from Thursday for 10 days as it battles to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

A total of 107 people have now been killed by the coronavirus in Italy, which has the most serious outbreak in Europe.

PM Giuseppe Conte said the health service risked being overwhelmed.

Most of the more than 3,000 cases are in the north but others have been confirmed in 19 of Italy's 20 regions.

Globally about 3,200 people have died and more than 90,000 have been infected, the vast majority in China, where the virus emerged late last year.

The World Health Organization has Roomba so far stopped short of declaring a pandemic - an epidemic spreading across the world through local transmission - but on Wednesday Germany's health minister said the coronavirus now met the definition.

"The situation is changing very quickly... What's clear is that we have not yet reached the peak of the outbreak," Jens Spahn said.

Confirmed cases have been reported in 81 countries, with Italy, Iran and South Korea emerging as hotspots outside China.

What is Italy doing?

Mr Conte called on all Italians to "do their part".

"We are in the same boat, whoever has the helm has the duty to indicate the route, we must make an extra effort, we must do it together," he said.

Education Minister Lucia Azzolina said she hoped students would be able to resume classes as soon as possible.

"My commitment is to ensure that the essential public service, albeit from a distance, is provided to all our students," she said.

Local media said health experts and Italy's health ministry had been in favour of closing schools.

Italy's death toll from the virus had jumped by 28 to 107, the Civil Protection Agency said on Wednesday. Most of the deaths have been in the Lombardy region around Milan, and in northern areas near Bologna and Venice.

Earlier measures including the quarantine of 11 towns near Milan with a combined population of 50,000 have failed to stop the spread of infections.

Italy is now also considering closing cinemas and theatres and banning public events, Reuters news agency reported, quoting a draft government decree.

The decree also tells Italians to avoid hugging and shaking hands as much as possible.

Which other countries have closed schools?

Mainland China and Hong Kong, Japan, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates have already closed schools or are about to do so - affecting millions of schoolchildren.

France has also closed about 120 schools in areas with the largest numbers of coronavirus infections.

Both primary and secondary schools have been shut in an area north of Paris where the main cluster of French cases has emerged and where two people who have died of the virus lived.

#coronavirus italy

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vsplusonline · 5 years ago

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Coronavirus outbreak: 648 more cases reported in China, death toll rises over 2,400

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/coronavirus-outbreak-648-more-cases-reported-in-china-death-toll-rises-over-2400/

Coronavirus outbreak: 648 more cases reported in China, death toll rises over 2,400

China reported Sunday a rise in new virus cases to 648, bringing mainland China’s total number of confirmed infections to 76,936. The daily death toll fell slightly to 97. In all, 2,442 people have died in the country from coronavirus.

2,442 people have died in the country from coronavirus in China. (Photo: AP)

China reported Sunday a rise in new virus cases to 648, bringing mainland China’s total number of confirmed infections to 76,936.

The daily death toll fell slightly to 97. In all, 2,442 people have died in the country from COVID-19.

The number of new cases has seesawed daily but remained under 1,000 for the past four days. Several changes to how the infections are counted, however, have made it difficult to draw conclusions from the figures.

The central Chinese city of Wuhan and other parts of Hubei province, where the outbreak first emerged in December, remain under lockdown. More than 80% of the country’s cases are in Hubei, where the death toll has also been higher than in the rest of the nation.

China’s Politburo, made up of senior officials of the ruling Communist Party, cautioned Friday that while the epidemic has been “preliminarily contained,” the country has yet to see a turning point.

Officials signaled that regular activities should gradually resume after the virus prompted an extension of last month’s Lunar New Year holiday. Many workplaces have opted to have their employees work remotely, and schools are conducting online classes in place of physical ones.

South Korea has reported more than 120 new virus cases and the country’s fourth fatality, raising the total number of those infected to 556.

The fresh national figures for the disease that emerged in China in December came as the number of viral infections soared mostly in and around the southeastern city of Daegu, where they were linked to a local church and a hospital. Thousands of worshipers have been screened for the virus.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 113 of the 120 new cases were reported in Daegu and its surrounding province.

Get real-time alerts and all the news on your phone with the all-new India Today app. Download from

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#Politics

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technologyinfosec · 5 years ago

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COVID-19: New coronavirus cases in China fall for second day as death toll passes 2,000

The death toll from the new coronavirus in mainland China passed 2,000 on Wednesday although the number of new cases fell for a second straight day, as authorities tightened already severe containment measures in the worst-hit city of Wuhan. (Coronavirus: Everything you need to know about the Covid-19 Wuhan virus outbreak) China's National Health Commission reported 1,749 new confirmed cases of coronavirus infections, the lowest daily rise since January 29, while Hubei province - the epicentre of the outbreak - reported the lowest number of new infections since February 11. The latest figures bring the total number of cases in China to over 74,000 with 2,004 deaths, three quarters of which have occurred in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan. The city of 11 million people, where the virus first appeared last year, is under virtual lockdown. Chinese officials have said the apparent slowdown in infection rates is evidence the flu-like virus is being brought under control but global health officials say it is still to early to predict how the epidemic will play out. The head of a leading hospital in Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have originated, died of the disease on Tuesday, the seventh health worker to have succumbed to the disease, known as COVID-19. Chinese state media reported that Hubei would adopt more forceful measures to find patients with fever to help contain the epidemic, on top of steps already taken to isolate the province. The province will check records of all fever patients who have visited doctors since Jan. 20, and people who have bought over-the-counter cough and fever medications at both brick-and-mortar and online drug stores, Xinhua reported, citing a notice by the province's epidemic control headquarters. The World Health Organization's (WHO) emergencies programme chief, Mike Ryan, said China had success with "putting out the fire" first in Hubei and ensuring that people returning to Beijing from the Lunar New Year holiday were monitored. "Right now, the strategic and tactical approach in China is the correct one," Ryan said. The number of new cases in mainland China excluding Hubei has now fallen for 15 straight days. The number of new infections ex-Hubei totalled 56 on Feb. 18, down from a peak of 890 on February 3. The biggest cluster of infections outside of China is on a cruise ship in quarantine off Japan, where more than 540 out of 3,700 passengers and crew have tested positive. Around 500 passengers were set to disembark on Wednesday, although those sharing a room with people testing positive would have to stay on board longer, Japanese media and officials said. Many of those infected have already been transferred to hospitals. About half the passengers are Japanese. A jet brought seven people from the ship to South Korea on Wednesday and Australia is expected to evacuate more than 200 of its citizens from the ship later in the day. The United States evacuated about 400 citizens from the Diamond Princess on Sunday, while Britain, Canada, Hong Kong, Italy and Taiwan have plans to repatriate passengers. Outside China, there have been 827 cases of the disease, and five deaths, according to a Reuters count based on official statements. Global repercussions Despite global concerns about the economic impact of the disease, China's ambassador to the European Union said on Tuesday this would be "limited, short-term and manageable" and that Beijing had enough resources to step in if needed. Chinese state television quoted President Xi Jinping as saying China could still meet its economic growth target for 2020 despite the epidemic. In a vote of confidence that the virus would not inflict lasting long-term damage on China's economy, a source said a Chinese fund attracted about 120 billion yuan ($17.1 billion) of subscriptions on Tuesday, 20 times the target. The mutual fund, which can invest up to 95% of assets in stocks, aimed to raise 6 billion yuan, but the marketing campaign was cut short by the outpouring of interest. Even so, the short-term impacts are playing havoc with trade and business around the world. Britain's biggest carmaker, Jaguar Land Rover, has flown Chinese parts in suitcases to Britain to maintain production and could run out after two weeks because of the coronavirus. South Korean President Moon Jae-in said the economy there was in an emergency situation and required stimulus as the epidemic had disrupted demand for South Korean goods such as cars, computer chips and smartphones. Data this week from Japan and Singapore indicated those economies were on the brink of recession. Read the full article

#technology #technologyinfosec

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healthyworthyofficial · 5 years ago

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New Horror .. Five MILLION people flee Wuhan taking the deadly coronavirus with them !

Around five million people were able to flee Wuhan before the city was put under quarantine because of the coronavirus, taking the deadly infection with them to neighbouring areas. For weeks after the first reports of a mysterious new virus in Wuhan, millions of people poured out of the central Chinese city, cramming onto buses, trains and planes as the first wave of China's great Lunar New Year migration broke across the nation. Some carried with them the new virus that has since claimed over 800 lives and sickened more than 37,000 people. Officials finally began to seal the borders on January 23, but it was too late. Speaking to reporters a few days after the city was put under quarantine, the mayor estimated that 5 million people had already left. Now, an analysis of domestic travel patterns using map location data from Chinese tech giant Baidu shows that in the two weeks before Wuhan's lockdown, nearly 70% of trips out of the central Chinese city were within Hubei province. The travel patterns broadly track with the early spread of the virus.

A worker monitors display screens for infrared thermometers as they check travelers at Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan in southern China's Hubei province before authorities seals the city Another 14% of the trips went to the neighboring provinces of Henan, Hunan, Anhui and Jiangxi. Nearly 2% slipped down to Guangdong province, the coastal manufacturing powerhouse across from Hong Kong, and the rest fanned out across China. The cities outside Hubei province that were top destinations for trips from Wuhan between January 10 and January 24 were Chongqing, a municipality next to Hubei province, Beijing and Shanghai. The majority of confirmed cases and deaths have occurred in China, within Hubei province, followed by high numbers of cases in central China, with pockets of infections in Chongqing, Shanghai and Beijing as well. 'It´s definitely too late,' said Jin Dong-Yan, a molecular virologist at Hong Kong University´s School of Biomedical Sciences. 'Five million out. That's a big challenge. Many of them may not come back to Wuhan but hang around somewhere else. 'To control this outbreak, we have to deal with this. On one hand, we need to identify them. On the other hand, we need to address the issue of stigma and discrimination.' He added that the initial spread of travelers to provinces in central China with large pools of migrant workers and relatively weaker health care systems 'puts a big burden on the hospitals ... of these resource-limited provinces.'

Passengers wearing protective masks walk outside Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province before authorities seals the city Baidu gathers travel data based on more than 120 billion daily location requests from its map app and other apps that use Baidu´s location services. Only data from users who agree to share their location is recorded and the company says data is masked to protect privacy. Baidu's publicly available data shows proportional travel, not absolute numbers of recorded trips, and does not include trips by people who don't use mobile phones or apps that rely on Baidu's popular location services. Public health officials and academics have been using this kind of mapping data for years to track the potential spread of disease. A group of researchers from Southampton University's WorldPop research group, which studies population dynamics, used 2013-2015 data from Baidu's location services and international flight itineraries to make a predictive global risk map for the likely spread of the virus from Wuhan. It's important to understand the population movements out of Wuhan before the city's lock down, said Lai Shengjie, a WorldPop researcher who used to work at Chinas Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 'Maybe they hadnt developed symptoms but could transmit the virus. We need to look at destinations across China and the world and focus on the main destinations and try to prepare for disease control and prevention,' he said.

An official uses an infrared thermometer on a traveler at a health screening checkpoint at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan in southern China's Hubei province - before the city was locked down The last trains left Wuhan the morning of January 23, cutting off a surge of outbound travel that had begun three days earlier, Baidu data shows. Nearby cities rushed to impose travel restrictions of their own. From January 23 to January 26, the 15 cities that Baidu data shows received the most travelers from Wuhan - a combined 70% - all imposed some level of travel restrictions. Other nations soon followed suit, including the United States, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and the Philippines, all of which have sharply restricted entry for people coming from China. Others, like Italy and Indonesia, have barred flights. WorldPop researchers found that travel out of Wuhan has historically ramped up in the weeks before Lunar New Year's Day. Based on historical travel patterns, they identified 18 high-risk cities within China that received the most travelers from Wuhan during this period.

Around five million people are thought to have fled Wuhan before the city was put under quarantine They then used 2018 flight itineraries from the International Air Transport Association to map the global connectivity of those cities. They note that travel patterns after restrictions started rolling out on Jan. 23 will not match historical norms and that the cities they identified are initial ports of landing; travelers could have subsequently moved elsewhere. The top 10 global destinations for travelers from high-risk Chinese cities around Lunar New Year, according to their analysis, were Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Australia. In Africa, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya topped the list. The African continent is particularly vulnerable because of the weaker health infrastructure in many countries, and the longer cases go undetected, the more likely they are to spread. 'Capacity is quite weak in many African health services,' Dr. Michel Yao, emergency operations manager for the World Health Organization in Africa, told the AP. This new virus 'could overwhelm health systems we have in Africa.' The Africa Centers for Disease Control, formed three years ago in response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, said screening has been stepped up at ports of entry across Africa. Egypt began screening passengers from affected areas in China on Jan. 16. Over the next eight days, Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa, Mauritius and Kenya all put screening systems in place. No confirmed cases have been reported. Lai and his colleagues said they found a 'high correlation' between the early spread of coronavirus cases and the geographical risk patterns they identified. The first case of the virus outside China was reported on January 13 in Thailand, followed two days later by Japan, the countries with the highest connectivity risk, according to WorldPop's analysis. Within 10 days of Wuhan's quarantine, the virus had spread to more than two dozen countries; nine of the 10 countries with the most flight connections to at-risk mainland cities also had the highest numbers of confirmed cases, mostly afflicting people who had been in China. The pattern isn't perfect; Zhejiang province, for example, was not a top destination from Wuhan this year, according to Baidu data, but now has among the highest numbers of confirmed cases. 'Our aim was to help guide some of the surveillance and thinking around the control measures,' said Andrew Tatem, the director of WorldPop, adding that his group plans to update their analysis. 'There was a huge amount of movement out of the Wuhan region before the controls came into place,' he said. 'Now we´re getting to stage of having data from multiple places on the scale of outbreaks elsewhere.' Scientists have identified the new virus as a coronavirus, a family of viruses that includes ones that can cause the common cold, as well as others that cause more serious illnesses, like SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. Many are now focused on what will happen after the second wave of the Lunar New Year rush as people once again crowd onto trains, buses and planes to head back to work. The Chinese government extended the holiday, which was supposed to end on Jan. 30, to Feb. 2. Shanghai, Beijing and several Chinese provinces ordered businesses to remain shut through Sunday, leaving the nation´s great megalopolises feeling like ghost towns. 'It[s in cities where people interact much more,' Tatem said. 'That´s potentially the worry of lots of people coming back in. A few people seeding that could result in a bigger problem.' Read the full article

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nothingsfinished-blog · 7 years ago

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The Schengen database is a collection of European persons deemed worthy of monitoring. This system is the most widely used identification retrieval tech for law enforcement across the continent. It’s purpose is to flag up suspicious people when they come into contact with the law from minor traffic violations to crossing international borders. France have added more people to this database than any other European country. A German parliamentarian, Andrej Hunko said “The increase in alerts cannot be explained by the threat of Islamist terrorism alone. Europol reports a four-digit number of confirmed foreign fighters, yet the increase of SIS alerts in 2017 is several times that… This could mean that families and contacts of these individuals are also being secretly monitored. It is also possible that the measure is being used on a large scale for combatting other criminal activity.” Interior Ministry data shows 60% of the requests made to the Schengen database are by France alone, considering 32 countries make up the Schengen area this is bananas.

China as a communist country is officially Atheist, however, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Taoism are currently recognized and allowed to practise their faith. However sects of these mainstream religions are viewed as Western impositions and not inline with socialist ideas. Now Beijing is under fire from the local flocks for talking to the Vatican and corrupting the governance of their religious structures. The Bible has now been discontinued across major book sellers in China. The Global Times in China said regulators "held talks" with large booksellers "about selling illegal products, publications and other printed materials online… The booksellers "had failed to regulate products and so caused a negative social impact", the regulators have said. The east have some beautiful schools teaching the balance of thought, but are apparently equalled by contradiction in outlawing opposing views.

Portugal situated on the Atlantic is primed for a renewable revolution. The Portuguese are able to harness fierce winds, strong hydro-power and days of blaring sun to reap the triple threat in renewables. March just gone saw 103% of all electricity needs being met with a green solution. Back in February 99% of Portugal's electricity was renewable. This trend has almost removed this European country from the reliance on fossil fuels. The Portuguese Renewable Energy Association said “However, it will eventually be necessary, here and then, the use of natural gas power plants, aggregated to interconnections and storage.”

More than 3000 Google Employees are circulating a letter (widely available online) demanding the end in Googles participation in AI surveillance tech, now being deployed by the Pentagon in Project Maven. “Don’t Be Evil” was the notorious founding motto used by google to set them apart. Now the employees write "By entering into this contract, Google will join the ranks of companies like Palantir, Raytheon, and General Dynamics," wrote the employees, who include senior engineers. "The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn't make this any less risky for Google.”

An underwater pipeline moving crude oil just off Borneo Island has ruptured releasing devastation across 16 miles of coastline. This thick black sludge has caused Indonesia to declare a state of emergency. The pipeline has shifted off course about 120 metres from its original location, attempts are currently underway to deploy oil booms to try and contain the spill. Environment Minister Nurbaya Bakar said “We have asked the team as well as Pertamina to prioritise the cleaning of oil spills in residential areas due to the stench and other potential risks”. Pertamina is the name of the state owned company responsible.

A Russian NGO reports on secret prisons in Chechnya which round up and abuse the LGBT community. The group say “The victims were subjected to tortures, humiliations, and other measures that harm their physical and psychological well-being.” the humans rights council of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, responded “I haven’t had a single request on this issue, but if I did, I wouldn’t even consider it… In our Chechen society, any person who respects our traditions and culture will hunt down this kind of person without any help from authorities.” President Kadyrov’s press secretary said ”This publication is a complete lie… It is impossible to detain and oppress those who simply don’t exist in the Republic… If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement agencies wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them, because their relatives would send them to a place of no return.”

The worlds new longest bridge at sea is to open in China. China’s new mega cities need to encourage mass migration. Constructing easy transport routes for people to move from one city to another is a key development for fluidity of movement across large areas with new infrastructure. The new bridge is 34 miles in length and connects Hong Kong, Macau, and the mainland's southern city, Zhuhai.

From next year the US will give Israel $10.41m every day. Israel recieves more money from the US than any other country. The military aid Israel receives is more than half of all that the US military provides worldwide. Israel’s AIPAC is the only foreign lobby in the US gov. that is not required to register as a foreign lobby. Israel is not a poor nation, the average Israelite enjoys a better living standard than most Americans.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have developed a prosthetic memory system for our inadequate human brain. Electrical signal codes reinforce memory pathways in patients. This device learns a patients specific memory pattern and uses this data to communicate with the brains hippocampus via an electrode. The paper is published in Journal of Neural Engineering. This evidence provides support for a previous experiment which restored the memory in rats. The paper’s lead author Robert Hampson says ““This is the first time scientists have been able to identify a patient’s own brain-cell code or pattern for memory and, in essence, ‘write in’ that code to make existing memory work better — an important first step in potentially restoring memory loss.” Common types of memory loss usually occur in people with Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and head injury.

#world news #news #china #christianity #google #france #darpa

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COVID-19: China sees daily death toll fall slightly as overall deaths number 2,442

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/covid-19-china-sees-daily-death-toll-fall-slightly-as-overall-deaths-number-2442/

COVID-19: China sees daily death toll fall slightly as overall deaths number 2,442

South Korea and China both reported a rise in new virus cases on Sunday, as the South Korean prime minister warned that the fast-spreading outbreak linked to a local church and a hospital in the country’s southeast had entered a “more grave stage.”

The death toll in Iran climbed to six, the highest outside China, and a dozen towns in northern Italy effectively went into lockdown as authorities tested hundreds of people who came into contact with an estimated 79 confirmed cases there. Two people have died in Italy.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that 113 of the 120 new cases were reported in the fourth-largest city of Daegu and surrounding areas. The agency said 70 of them are linked to a branch of the Shincheonji church in Daegu, which has become the biggest cluster of viral infections in the country, which now has a total of 556 cases.

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READ MORE: COVID-19: Two dead, 79 infected in Italy as government shuts down worst hit areas

Mainland China reported 648 new infections for a total of 76,936. The daily death toll fell slightly to 97. In all, 2,442 people have died in the country from COVID-19.

The number of new Chinese cases has seesawed daily but remained under 1,000 for the past four days. Several changes to how the infections are counted, however, have made it difficult to draw conclusions from the figures.

The central Chinese city of Wuhan and other parts of Hubei province, where the outbreak first emerged in December, remain under lockdown. More than 80 per cent of the country’s cases are in Hubei, where the death toll has also been higher than in the rest of the nation.

0:57 Coronavirus outbreak: Tokyo governor criticizes suggestion London could host 2020 Olympics

Coronavirus outbreak: Tokyo governor criticizes suggestion London could host 2020 Olympics

Officials signalled that regular activities should gradually resume after the virus prompted an extension of last month’s Lunar New Year holiday. Many workplaces have opted to have their employees work remotely, and schools are conducting online classes in place of physical ones.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a male patient hospitalized at Cheongdo city, near Daegu, died on Sunday, the country’s fourth fatality. He was believed to be 57 years old but no other details on him were made available.

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READ MORE: COVID-19: Iran confirms 6th person has died from virus

On Saturday night, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said in a nationally televised address that the virus outbreak had entered “a more grave stage” and repeated the government is making all-out efforts to contain the further spread of the disease.

Chung also said his government will sternly deal with any acts that hamper national quarantine efforts.

Globally, nearly 78,000 people have been infected in 29 countries. In some countries, some virus clusters have shown no direct link to travel to China.

Israel, which reported one case, turned back a South Korean airliner with most of its passengers after it landed at the country’s Ben Gurion airport Saturday evening. Twelve Israelis on board were evacuated and quarantined. The airplane was taxied away from the allotted terminal, Israeli media reported.

0:36 Repatriated Canadians from Japan to be treated individually if diagnosed with COVID-19

Repatriated Canadians from Japan to be treated individually if diagnosed with COVID-19

South Korea earlier informed Israel that nine members of a group who toured Israel and the West Bank for a week this month tested positive for the virus. The tourists were diagnosed upon returning home. Israeli and Palestinian health authorities asked people who were in close contact with the tourists to quarantine themselves.

A team of global experts with the World Health Organization is on the way to China’s Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Saturday. It has been visiting other parts of China this week.

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Tedros also told a meeting of African health ministers that the WHO is concerned about cases with “no clear epidemiological link, such as travel history to China or contact with a confirmed case.” He is especially concerned about the growing number of cases in Iran, where 28 people have been infected.

Associated Press writer Yanan Wang and researcher Henry Hou in Beijing contributed to this report.

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Where did they go? Millions left Wuhan before quarantine

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/where-did-they-go-millions-left-wuhan-before-quarantine/

Where did they go? Millions left Wuhan before quarantine

SHANGHAI — For weeks after the first reports of a mysterious new virus in Wuhan, millions of people poured out of the central Chinese city, cramming onto buses, trains and planes as the first wave of China’s great Lunar New Year migration broke across the nation. Some carried with them the new virus that has since claimed over 800 lives and sickened more than 37,000 people.

Officials finally began to seal the borders on Jan. 23. But it was too late. Speaking to reporters a few days after the city was put under quarantine, the mayor estimated that 5 million people had already left.

Where did they go?

An Associated Press analysis of domestic travel patterns using map location data from Chinese tech giant Baidu shows that in the two weeks before Wuhan’s lockdown, nearly 70 per cent of trips out of the central Chinese city were within Hubei province. Baidu has a map app that is similar to Google Maps, which is blocked in China.

Another 14 per cent of the trips went to the neighbouring provinces of Henan, Hunan, Anhui and Jiangxi. Nearly 2 per cent slipped down to Guangdong province, the coastal manufacturing powerhouse across from Hong Kong, and the rest fanned out across China. The cities outside Hubei province that were top destinations for trips from Wuhan between Jan. 10 and Jan. 24 were Chongqing, a municipality next to Hubei province, Beijing and Shanghai.

The travel patterns broadly track with the early spread of the virus. The majority of confirmed cases and deaths have occurred in China, within Hubei province, followed by high numbers of cases in central China, with pockets of infections in Chongqing, Shanghai and Beijing as well.

“It’s definitely too late,” said Jin Dong-Yan, a molecular virologist at Hong Kong University’s School of Biomedical Sciences. “Five million out. That’s a big challenge. Many of them may not come back to Wuhan but hang around somewhere else. To control this outbreak, we have to deal with this. On one hand, we need to identify them. On the other hand, we need to address the issue of stigma and discrimination.”

He added that the initial spread of travellers to provinces in central China with large pools of migrant workers and relatively weaker health care systems “puts a big burden on the hospitals … of these resource-limited provinces.”

Baidu gathers travel data based on more than 120 billion daily location requests from its map app and other apps that use Baidu’s location services. Only data from users who agree to share their location is recorded and the company says data is masked to protect privacy. Baidu’s publicly available data shows proportional travel, not absolute numbers of recorded trips, and does not include trips by people who don’t use mobile phones or apps that rely on Baidu’s popular location services.

Public health officials and academics have been using this kind of mapping data for years to track the potential spread of disease.

A group of researchers from Southampton University’s WorldPop research group, which studies population dynamics, used 2013-2015 data from Baidu’s location services and international flight itineraries to make a predictive global risk map for the likely spread of the virus from Wuhan.

It’s important to understand the population movements out of Wuhan before the city’s lock down, said Lai Shengjie, a WorldPop researcher who used to work at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Maybe they hadn’t developed symptoms but could transmit the virus. We need to look at destinations across China and the world and focus on the main destinations and try to prepare for disease control and prevention,” he said.

The last trains left Wuhan the morning of Jan. 23, cutting off a surge of outbound travel that had begun three days earlier, Baidu data shows. Nearby cities rushed to impose travel restrictions of their own. From Jan. 23 to Jan. 26, the 15 cities that Baidu data shows received the most travellers from Wuhan — a combined 70% — all imposed some level of travel restrictions.

Other nations soon followed suit, including the United States, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and the Philippines, all of which have sharply restricted entry for people coming from China. Others, like Italy and Indonesia, have barred flights.

WorldPop researchers found that travel out of Wuhan has historically ramped up in the weeks before Lunar New Year’s Day. Based on historical travel patterns, they identified 18 high-risk cities within China that received the most travellers from Wuhan during this period. They then used 2018 flight itineraries from the International Air Transport Association to map the global connectivity of those cities.

They note that travel patterns after restrictions started rolling out on Jan. 23 will not match historical norms and that the cities they identified are initial ports of landing; travellers could have subsequently moved elsewhere.

The top 10 global destinations for travellers from high-risk Chinese cities around Lunar New Year, according to their analysis, were Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Australia.

In Africa, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya topped the list.

The African continent is particularly vulnerable because of the weaker health infrastructure in many countries, and the longer cases go undetected, the more likely they are to spread.

“Capacity is quite weak in many African health services,” Dr. Michel Yao, emergency operations manager for the World Health Organization in Africa, told the AP. This new virus “could overwhelm health systems we have in Africa.”

The Africa Centers for Disease Control, formed three years ago in response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, said screening has been stepped up at ports of entry across Africa. Egypt began screening passengers from affected areas in China on Jan. 16. Over the next eight days, Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa, Mauritius and Kenya all put screening systems in place. No confirmed cases have been reported.

Lai and his colleagues said they found a “high correlation” between the early spread of coronavirus cases and the geographical risk patterns they identified.

The first case of the virus outside China was reported on Jan. 13 in Thailand, followed two days later by Japan, the countries with the highest connectivity risk, according to WorldPop’s analysis. Within 10 days of Wuhan’s quarantine, the virus had spread to more than two dozen countries; nine of the 10 countries with the most flight connections to at-risk mainland cities also had the highest numbers of confirmed cases, mostly afflicting people who had been in China.

The pattern isn’t perfect; Zhejiang province, for example, was not a top destination from Wuhan this year, according to Baidu data, but now has among the highest numbers of confirmed cases.

“Our aim was to help guide some of the surveillance and thinking around the control measures,” said Andrew Tatem, the director of WorldPop, adding that his group plans to update their analysis.

“There was a huge amount of movement out of the Wuhan region before the controls came into place,” he said. “Now we’re getting to stage of having data from multiple places on the scale of outbreaks elsewhere.”

Scientists have identified the new virus as a coronavirus, a family of viruses that includes ones that can cause the common cold, as well as others that cause more serious illnesses, like SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Many are now focused on what will happen after the second wave of the Lunar New Year rush as people once again crowd onto trains, buses and planes to head back to work. The Chinese government extended the holiday, which was supposed to end on Jan. 30, to Feb. 2. Shanghai, Beijing and several Chinese provinces ordered businesses to remain shut through Sunday, leaving the nation’s great megalopolises feeling like ghost towns.

“It’s in cities where people interact much more,” Tatem said. “That’s potentially the worry of lots of people coming back in. A few people seeding that could result in a bigger problem.”

——

Associated Press writers Cara Anna in Johannesburg and Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report.

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Where did they go? Millions fled Wuhan, China before coronavirus lockdown

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/where-did-they-go-millions-fled-wuhan-china-before-coronavirus-lockdown/

Where did they go? Millions fled Wuhan, China before coronavirus lockdown

For weeks after the first reports of a mysterious new virus in Wuhan, millions of people poured out of the central Chinese city, cramming onto buses, trains and planes as the first wave of China’s great Lunar New Year migration broke across the nation. Some carried with them the new virus that has since claimed over 800 lives and sickened more than 37,000 people.

Officials finally began to seal the borders on Jan. 23. But it was too late. Speaking to reporters a few days after the the city was put under quarantine, the mayor estimated that 5 million people had already left.

Where did they go?

READ MORE: Hunting a virus — How doctors trace an outbreak

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2:05 B.C. woman trying to get daughter out of Wuhan

B.C. woman trying to get daughter out of Wuhan

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READ MORE: Coronavirus has killed more than SARS, but health officials say new cases slowing

Public health officials and academics have been using this kind of mapping data for years to track the potential spread of disease.

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2:29 Novel coronavirus outbreak: 200+ Canadians begin 14-day quarantine at CFB Trenton

Novel coronavirus outbreak: 200+ Canadians begin 14-day quarantine at CFB Trenton

The last trains left Wuhan the morning of Jan. 23, cutting off a surge of outbound travel that had begun three days earlier, Baidu data shows. Nearby cities rushed to impose travel restrictions of their own. From Jan. 23 to Jan. 26, the 15 cities that Baidu data shows received the most travellers from Wuhan — a combined 70 per cent — all imposed some level of travel restrictions.

READ MORE: B.C. mother desperate to get young daughter out of Wuhan, where husband is sick with coronavirus

3:12 Coronavirus outbreak: Ottawa professor offers glimpse of life for Canadians inside CFB Trenton

Coronavirus outbreak: Ottawa professor offers glimpse of life for Canadians inside CFB Trenton

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In Africa, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya topped the list.

The African continent is particularly vulnerable because of the weaker health infrastructure in many countries, and the longer cases go undetected, the more likely they are to spread.

READ MORE: Too early to know if China lockdown effective in limiting coronavirus spread, experts say

Lai and his colleagues said they found a “high correlation” between the early spread of coronavirus cases and the geographical risk patterns they identified.

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READ MORE: Coronavirus and health-care workers — What are the risks and how are they mitigated?

The pattern isn’t perfect; Zhejiang province, for example, was not a top destination from Wuhan this year, according to Baidu data, but now has among the highest numbers of confirmed cases.

“Our aim was to help guide some of the surveillance and thinking around the control measures,” said Andrew Tatem, the director of WorldPop, adding that his group plans to update their analysis.

1:00 Coronavirus outbreak: Death toll rises to over 700 U.S. man becomes first non-Chinese fatality

Coronavirus outbreak: Death toll rises to over 700 U.S. man becomes first non-Chinese fatality

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“It’s in cities where people interact much more,” Tatem said. “That’s potentially the worry of lots of people coming back in. A few people seeding that could result in a bigger problem.”

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